


Written on Skin

by MissEllaVation



Category: U2 (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 16:14:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18391880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissEllaVation/pseuds/MissEllaVation
Summary: Yet another one of my fics wherein Bono and Edge sneak off and play hooky from the world. Just the two of them, in a room. They've drunk some wine. They talk too much.





	Written on Skin

**Author's Note:**

> It’s the summer of 2001, sometime between June 22 and July 6. U2 has just finished the first North American leg of the Elevation tour and is about to move on to Europe. There’s a lot brewing in the world and in people’s lives. Bono’s dad is not doing well, for one thing. 
> 
> But I think it’s okay for us to imagine that B and E have reserved one day to sneak off to a comfortable room somewhere—maybe France, maybe elsewhere—to shed their clothes, and to climb into bed for an extended session of foreplay and pillow talk. 
> 
> They were both so intensely beautiful at that time, weren’t they? I wanted to write something that was pure sex and nothing else, to see if I could write a sex scene that would take more than 37 seconds to read. (There is a reason I call myself The Reluctant Pornographer.) I don’t think I’ve done that here, but I hope this small fic is at least a little bit sexy, because that’s all it’s supposed to be, really. 
> 
> The title is taken from “Book of Your Heart,” a Song of Experience. :)
> 
> 3450 words, Edge POV.

You’re lying on your back with the afternoon sunlight all golden on your skin, and suddenly I don’t know what to do. It's as if you are a perfectly ripe nectarine and I’m trying to decide where to take the first bite.

“What are you smiling about, Edge?”

“Not much.”

“Guess I’ll just get dressed and go, then.”

“Don’t you dare move.”

I will kiss your forehead. There. Bless you, your soft skin, and the hard shell of bone protecting the busy mind underneath. Today is just for us; just for you and me. Just one sweet day in our undisclosed location.

You stretch all of your limbs and yawn, unselfconscious as a two-year-old.

“Tired, sweetheart?”

“I’m never tired.”

“Good.”

Let me take inventory and make sure everything is still in place. Starting at the top: your funny zigzag hairline, your hair so black it absorbs light. The lines under your eyes are becoming quite pronounced, but they only make you more beautiful—they’re so purely you, you’ve always had them, and the skin there is achingly soft to my fingers. You’re a bit thin from work and from worry. Your cheekbones are prominent, and your eyes are enormous and a little sad. Your nose is, as ever, an aerodynamic vehicle facing down a strong wind. But I can’t imagine you with a different one. I’m sure your nose has as much to do with the quality of your voice as does the shape of your mouth, the cleft valentine of your jaw, and the brutally sexual length of your neck. Your neck is just so _blatant._

“Would you ever stop gaping at me, The Edge?”

“No, I think I would not ever.”

You give me a little pie-wedge of a smile and cradle my face between your hands. “You’re sunburned again, love. You’re just like strawberries and cream.”

“Are you hungry, Bono?”

“And your eyes are the same color as the water in that fountain in the courtyard of the villa in Alassio, remember? The one with those minty green lights under the surface…”

“The villa in where?”

“…Cool, like a pair of wintergreen throat lozenges.”

“Now that’s a sexy image. Thank you. Is your throat hurting?”

“Not a bit.”

“Good.”

You shift around underneath me, and various bits of you rub against various bits of me. You run your hands up and down my back, slowly and with a bit of force. I can feel my blood thrumming through every extremity.

“Kiss me already, The Edge.”

“Where shall I start?”

“I mean, the mouth is traditional, but don’t let that hold you back.”

“No, tradition is good.”

A few feather-light kisses, then I part your lips with my tongue. To be inside you, even just this much. You respond with a rough moan. I can taste the cinnamon gum you were chewing earlier, even after the wine we’ve been drinking. It makes sense. If I’m wintergreen, you are cinnamon—hot and red.

You catch my lower lip between your teeth, then release it. “Just kiss me till I can’t fucking breathe.”

It never changes. It never changes. I’m so grateful for this. I bury my face in your neck and I breathe you in and chase you with my tongue and my teeth. This could easily be a day ten years ago—our first furtive encounter in the dunes. I know you remember. The cold wind, the sand in our clothes, my come on your fingers. I’m fucking ravenous for you now, just as I was then.

But that was then. I want to prolong this day. I want to make everything last. So I raise my head to look down at you again. _Looking down on my objectives,_ as someone once sang, in a voice that moved me so deeply I had to walk out of the studio for a solitary smoke. (Fact: I couldn’t stand the idea that you might not have been singing about me.)

Some tiny things about you never cease to fascinate me, like the fine pattern of blood vessels in your eyelids, and the freckle above your left eye, and the freckle just to the left of the tip of your nose. (You have considerably more freckles on your left than on your right.) Your nose itself—more intricate than what the average caricaturist sees. Every odd little dimple and indent around your mouth. The black hair curling behind your ear, just long enough now to brush your neck. Your neck…

“God, Edge. _God,_ Edge, you must be a vampire.”

“Sorry. You just taste so good.”

“It’s alright. You can suck me dry.”

“Aren’t you a little _tart._ Oh, I’m afraid I’ve left a mark here, B.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Your voice takes on an odd tinge, suddenly. A little regretful. “They fade soon enough.”

“You okay, sweetheart?”

“Well—look, this might sound maudlin—but sometimes I wish you _could_ leave a mark on me. I mean, a real one, an outward one. Something that the world could see. Something that would mark me as yours. Something obvious and defiant.”

“I think we have that obvious, defiant thing already, and it’s called U2.”

You laugh in my ear, softly. The entire surface of my body responds as if brushed by wings.

“Well, yeah. But just because people can see U2 doesn’t mean they can see…”

“That we’ve been fucking since about 1990?” I grind against you to emphasize my point.

“Oh, yes. Exactly that… I wish we didn’t have to hide it. Or, well, _sublimate_ it into little stage-plays.”

I don’t say what I’m thinking—that we don’t really _have_ to hide it. Saying so will only take us down a complex road where the possibility of resentment lurks behind every billboard, and we haven’t got time for that.

“Look Bono, I can see you’re feeling talkative, and I’m glad to talk, but I want you as close to me as possible.”

“Fair enough.”

You lift your body toward mine; you wrap a leg around my back. The heat of your skin blends with the damp heat of this summer day, with the sunlight flooding the room. I bury my face in your neck again. “Mm. Your thighs could kill a man.”

“Just you, skinny boy.”

“You still calling me that?”

“Well, how about ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Skinny Boy?’ Think your little spine can handle all this force?”

“Couldn’t give a fuck. Crush me if you want to.”

I feel a little throb go through your cock, pressed against my hip. My own answers in sympathy. It’s always music with us. The call-and-response. I trace your lips with my fingertip; your mouth opens slightly, like a budding rose. If I could just put my entire self inside you, or you inside me…

“Edge.”

“Yeah.”

“Talking of marks, what do you make of all the U2 tattoos around lately?”

“ _This_ is what you want to talk about? Now? Yes, people certainly have tattoos. Sometimes they even show them to me.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I _feel_ like I want to fuck you into next week.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Right into next week, maybe even next month.”

“Edge.”

“Okay. I feel a little weird about it. But don’t you think it’s a generational thing? Everybody under thirty seems to have some kind of tattoo.”

“Yeah... I just worry about people marking themselves like that. With us, I mean. I hope we don’t give them cause to regret it.”

“That’s on them, if we do.”

“Literally _on_ them! No, but it feels like a responsibility to me. All these people carrying our words on their skin. Or poorly-drawn Joshua tree shapes. Or worse—our faces. Have you seen the ones with our faces?”

“You worry too much. Worry about yourself. Or worry about me. I’m suffering here.”

“Oh, are you?”

“Yes. You know, I hear it’s unhealthy to have a hard-on for more than four hours.”

“I think that’s only for the chemically-induced ones.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway we’ve only been here an hour.”

“I was hard before I got here.”

“Edge.” Your hand moves over me just a bit too casually. “I can understand it, you know.”

“God. Understand what?”

“The need to mark your body with the thing you love. To wear it right on your flesh.”

“I want to wear _you_ on my flesh. Just please keep your hand there. Yes, like that. Good.”

“Listen, you brute. There was a time…ah, never mind.”

“What is it, sweetheart?”

“There was a time,” your voice drops to a near whisper, as if you’re afraid someone outside might hear. You move your hands to my neck and pull me close. Your lips move against my ear. “There was a time I wanted you so much, so painfully, I would have carved your name right over my heart. I actually used to imagine doing it. To make you understand. The way Sid Vicious wrote ‘Nancy’ on his chest with a knife and just left it bloody.”

“What? No. When?”

“I guess, 1977?”

“No. _You._ When did _you_ think about this?”

“Oh. Ten years ago? No, more. Maybe fifteen.”

I do the math. I’m a little shocked. I knew there was something unspoken between us as far back as that, and even before, but I thought I was the one who suffered more. I hate to think about you pining away—for anyone. And I adore your body. I always have. Its solidity, its generosity, its plentitude. Your warm, dappled skin. I lower myself carefully to rub my face on your chest. The band of soft, dark hair, and your heart beating steadily, left-of-center. “Oh my baby, you are not Sid Vicious. Nor are you a tree. Please do not carve anything onto yourself.”

“Well of course I won’t. I’m _forty-one.”_

“Right.”

“I suppose it would be a little awkward at home too.”

“I’d say so.”

“Anyway, you’re already there. Written on my skin. Can’t you see it?”

“Where?”

“Here.” You point to your heart. “‘Edge.’ In large capital letters.”

“Bono. Anywhere else?”

“Lots of places.”

“Show me.”

“Here.” You take my hand and place my fingers on your cheek, your lips, your neck. I leave a kiss in each location. “Here.” The hollow of your arm, where the skin is nearly transparent. “Here.” An unbearably soft spot, just below your rib cage. “And of course, here.” Your cock, where I bend my head to leave the softest, most reverent kiss of all. I know that’s not quite what you have in mind, but you’ve been making me wait, and why should I suffer alone? I like the way you ripple underneath me. Your hip fitting into the palm of my hand, rounded, almost feminine.

“Edge…”

“Hm?”

“Since I seem to be telling you disturbing little secrets today, would you like to hear another?”

“Well…why not, I guess.”

“This one’s more fun. Possibly.”

“Thank goodness. Go on, then.”

“Are you sure you’re ready?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You do not. Okay, listen: sometimes I wish I were a woman.”

“I am not surprised in the least.”

“There’s more, gobshite.”

“Go on.”

“Sometimes I wish I were a woman, _specifically,_ so that you could…”

“So I could…?”

“Just sort of slip inside me without it being any kind of big deal.”

“Oh. But I think that would be _quite_ a big deal, don’t you?”

“Yes, but I think you know what I’m saying. It would be a bit easier. I mean, I could just do this—”

Before I can even react you shove me onto my back, throw off the covers, and kneel over me, holding me between your thighs.

“Well hello there, uncommonly muscular woman.”

You bend forward, and again place your mouth very close to my ear. “And then I could lean down just like this, and tease you with my long, luxurious hair and my girlish breasts.”

“Hm. You would never have girlish breasts, B. Beautiful ripe melons, you would have.”

“Would I now?”

“You would. And I would hold them in my hands, just like this. Just brush my thumbs across your nipples. And then my tongue… And you would make the very same sound that you just made. That little gasp.”

“Edge.”

“My beautiful blue-eyed girl, my black-haired colleen…”

“I get the sense, Edge, that you have already given this idea some thought.”

“Might have. You have, em, appeared to me in dreams on occasion, wearing a female form.”

You take this information in with the most glorious laugh, though you’re clearly not any more surprised than I was at your little secret. And while your hair isn’t quite long enough, you manage to give the impression that you’re tossing it back over your shoulder. “You sure it was me?”

“Absolutely.”

“When did this happen?”

“The first time?”

“Okay…”

“Probably 1979 or 80.”

“Oh my. You filthy little skinny-boy. How about the most recent time?”

I move my hands to your hips, trying to settle you somewhere in the vicinity of my poor, neglected cock. “I’m not saying.”

“Noted. And what exactly did you do with this ravishing, voluptuous woman who also happened to be me?”

“What do you think I did with you?”

“Hm.” You mull this over while moving softly against me, smiling, purring a bit. “Was it good for me too, Edge?”

“Of course it was!”

“And how did you—you know—get things started?”

“Um, well, I believe I had you kind of sit on my face for a bit.”

“Oh my goodness!”

“Your goodness has nothing to do with any of this.”

“But your beautiful angelic alabaster face!”

“It’s not as if we’ve never—”

“Yeah, but you never _say_ things like that. Never quite in those terms.”

“What terms?”

“Terms like—”

“Sit on my face?”

“Jaysis. It’s like watching a Della Robbia baby spit up its pablum.”

“You love it, Bono.”

“I do.” You remain there, astride my hips, looking down at me. You’re as hard as I am. We are ridiculous men. “So anyway.”

“Yes?”

“If I were to just make my way along your body in a northerly direction, like this…”

“You mean you wanna sit on my face?”

You lean across me, close enough for me to catch your scent of high-end English soap and pure, uncut maleness, close enough for me to touch the tip of my tongue to whatever bits of you pass near my mouth: armpit, nipple, ribcage. You do something fussy with the pillows behind my head.

“Sorry, I have to adjust you a bit.”

“Do you?”

“For the angle. How’s that?”

I start to answer but suddenly the tip of your cock is brushing against my cheek, then the corner of my mouth.

“Is this alright?”

“You _know_ it’s alright, sweetheart. Anything you want is alright.”

The illusion of your womanishness is lost completely as you enter my mouth, with your arms braced on the headboard, taut and gorgeously male. The taste of your skin: sweet and salt in balance. You are moving, but so carefully. I watch you alternately lose yourself and come back to check in with me.

“Gorgeous Edge, my love. Hold on to me, I don’t want to—don’t let me get too—

It’s a rare event to be sucking your cock and seeing your face at the same time, just the way that I love to see it and almost never do, from underneath, watching you breathe, watching your eyes watching me, then closing with pleasure like a cat’s eyes, your smile flowering across your whole face the way it does.

“You’re so beautiful, Edge,” you murmur. “How are you so fucking beautiful?”

I’m in no condition to answer. I manage a shrug. There, I’ve made you laugh. It’s almost enough for me. Almost.

“This doesn’t seem fair.” You reach down to stroke my eyebrow, my cheek, then gently disengage yourself from me.

“I really don’t mind, Bono—I love—you can—”

“Shh.” You prod and push me around a bit until you’re satisfied I’m settled comfortably among the pillows. Then you turn away and nest into my side, your mouth hovering tantalizingly over my cock. “I just like things to be a little more egalitarian, as a rule.”

“Yes, that’s one of many great things about you.”

You put your hand between my thighs; they part for you gratefully. When you take me in your mouth I’m afraid I might start sobbing; I feel once again like I’ve been waiting for you for so long—just for you. You know me better than anyone. You weren’t the first, but you are the one who loves me best and has loved me the longest, the one who never left me, the one who held onto me during the darkest hours.

You were right to move us into place like this, so we can be one inside the other, giving each other pleasure with mouths and fingers. Giving pleasure and taking it. We’re so good at this now. I can almost hear your thoughts, just the way I can feel your hot sweet mouth pulling on me, and all I want is for this to feel for you the way it does for me. I love having you in my mouth, I love the heat, the way you smell, I love the, the, indescribable sweetness like a color, like a sound, just as pure as that, building and building like those moments on stage when I’m playing at my best, fingers flying, fingers exactly where, where they should be and then I look up and catch your smile, always this music, with us, this music, the call-and-response, the call-and-response, the call-and-response, and _there,_ God, _there_ , what everyone is waiting for, the _hook_. Make it last, just let it, please, the light, all the sounds and the waves, the warmth, and your tongue catching me, your throat moving, swallowing. You swallowing me; me swallowing you.

I won’t let you go. I’ll stay here with my eyes shut and your cock still in my mouth, and mine still in yours, while you make incoherent little sounds of pleasure, because you can never stop making sounds, and I want to hear them, I want to hear them on my deathbed, Bono, angel, love.

At some point we will have to let each other go and breathe again, separately. But not for a while.

The room resolves itself slowly into ordinary shapes and objects: the bed, the tables and lamps, the paintings on the walls. Our clothes in a heap on the floor. The sun is coming in at a lower angle now; the light is mellow. The breeze stirs the curtains and fills the room with the scent of the sea. You’ve turned around and around like a cat, and now the top of your head is tucked under my chin, just right.

We try to avoid music at times like this, when our time is limited, because it’s hard for us to stop focusing on it. But now, someone outside, not far from where we are, has turned a radio on. We drift through a couple of bland pop tunes. Then, in a moment of inspiration, the DJ selects Prince: “I Would Die 4 U.”

“If there was a way to dance,” you murmur, “without actually getting up…”

I know the narrator of the song is supposed to be God—I _think—_ but I’m ignoring that bit in favor of a more corporeal entity who is not a woman, not a man, not a lover, not a friend, but something more than all of those things.

“Stop it, Edge.”

“Stop what?”

“I can feel it. You’re going all sentimental on me.”

“Now if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle—”

You sigh. “I just can’t believe we have to do the whole thing all over again.”

I don’t have to ask what you mean.

“I love it,” you say, quickly. “I love it more than anyone, once we’re out there. But I’m not immune to a little existential dread in the days leading up to the first show.”

“It’s gonna be great, Bono. It’s gonna be brilliant. You and me, bopping around the big Valentine heart, while everybody out there is wondering exactly what the fuck we’re doing…”

“Edge.” You look up at me with a half-smile. “Are we done here for today?”

“Done?” I pull you as close to me as I possibly can. No air between us, no room, no space for anyone else. At least for the moment. “No way, sunshine.”

You take the tiniest bite out of my neck, marking me. “Good,” you say. “That’s good.”


End file.
